Cluster Map

February 26, 2007

The Bell Curve and Social Stability

Last month Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, wrote a series of provocative articles in the Wall Street Journal decrying our relative ignorance of the importance of the role that native intelligence plays in our ability to maintain a highly complex, modern society. He wrote specifically about the poor fit between those whose IQ is below the 75-85% mark and four year colleges. He suggested we should focus much more on vocational training for those whose IQ, interests, or aptitudes are inimical to obtaining a four year college education (not a degree, which has been devalued by the need for colleges to reward their consumers in order to keep the funds flowing). He also suggested in the last article that the "gifted" should be challenged more and taught a sense of responsibility to those who are less well equipped to run our complex society.

He correctly anticipated that his arguments would meet with some resistance from those who believe that equality means that we must deny differences between individuals. His arguments are also amenable to dissenting views as to what constitutes intelligence.

In particular, Arnold Kling and Claude M. Steele have written essays that attempt to address the questions around intelligence. There are many others who have attempted to address intelligence, usually in an attempt to explain or minimize the possibility of intelligence being constitutional and relatively immutable. For the purposes of my discussion, these distinctions do not matter.

I would suggest that in any society, technological progress depends on an extremely small percentage of extremely talented people (1/2%, perhaps?); they are supported by a larger, though still quite small, group of talented people who can apply and expand on the genius of the very few (another 2-5%?); in turn,there is a larger cohort, perhaps 15-25% of the population who have the requisite abilities to work the levers of the complex machinery that supports our incredibly complex society. How societies manage the inequalities that spring from such unequal abilities seems to me to be a key factor in sustaining a stable, highly dynamic, society.

[NB-My numbers are mere guesses but are reflective of the underlying dynamic of the intelligence bell curve.]

This means that the society that is best able to identify, nurture, and reward the top 1/2-5% and to a lesser extent, the top 5-25%, while keeping the less talented 75% engaged, is likely to be the most successful going forward. In other words, on the left tail of the curve, the top 25% will almost certainly be rewarded with more than 25% of the wealth of a society. As long as they generate wealth in significant excess of their rewards (the wealth will trickle down, as it were) the social structure can be maintained in a relatively stable state.

[I am purposely not addressing comments I have read that some cultural groups inherently have less intellectual ability than others. I certainly don't know enough about the topic and I doubt very much that anyone has yet devised a way to test the proposition. Perhaps if liberal democracy with transparency can ever come to such a benighted population, we will be able to determine if they have what it takes to succeed in the modern world.]

Now here's the tricky part: every culture rewards the top 1/2-5% disproportionately!

In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the rewards went to those who shared the right religion, ethnicity, and, most importantly, the requisite ruthlessness. You could argue that pre-war Iraq's axis of success was ruthlessness or sociopathy alongside of intelligence. Sociopathy, like everything else, exhibits a bell curve response within the population. Imagine living in a society on which the x-axis includes sociopathy, and you can imagine what living in Iraq was like.

China is trying to square a different circle. Their x-axis would include some level of overlay between intelligence and political acceptability. They have remained stable by growing the economy at phenomenal rates for the last 15 years; what happens when their economy hits a bump will be instructive.

Europe has an interesting problem. They certainly have a bell curve in terms of ability, but much more so than in America have created artificial constraints that keep the curve extremely steep. In other words the tails of the curve are close together so that inequality is minimized. Combining the intelligence bell curve with the reward bell curve leads to a curve whose tails are closer to the mean than would be optimal; that is one reason so much innovation is coming out of Japan, Israel, India, and less and less form old Europe.

Much of our current tension arises from the clash of world view between those of us who would like to maximize the opportunities of the most talented individual, even if that means that the level of inequality rises, versus those who see inequality per se as problematic. Knowing that there will always be 49% of the American people living below the average income is instructive. If you believe that the rich getting richer means that the Bell Curve is being flattened out, ie the mean doesn't change, then you believe inequality is getting worse and we need to transfer wealth from the wealthy to the poor. If you believe that the rich getting richer means that the entire curve is shifting to the left (ie, the mean is moving toward greater wealth) then you should be pleased with the current economy.

Wealth is a byproduct of technological progress. It is created by that tiny fraction of the population who have the requisite abilities to take appropriate risks, devote their energies to developing their ideas, and working to bring their ideas to fruition. If this intelligent elite fails to improve the lives of the great bulk of people who ultimately depend on their success, instability is sure to follow.

[These ideas are unpolished and unfinished. I do know that it is better to reward the most creative and intelligent rather than the most ruthless, but the details need work.]

Comments

The Bell Curve and Social Stability

Last month Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, wrote a series of provocative articles in the Wall Street Journal decrying our relative ignorance of the importance of the role that native intelligence plays in our ability to maintain a highly complex, modern society. He wrote specifically about the poor fit between those whose IQ is below the 75-85% mark and four year colleges. He suggested we should focus much more on vocational training for those whose IQ, interests, or aptitudes are inimical to obtaining a four year college education (not a degree, which has been devalued by the need for colleges to reward their consumers in order to keep the funds flowing). He also suggested in the last article that the "gifted" should be challenged more and taught a sense of responsibility to those who are less well equipped to run our complex society.

He correctly anticipated that his arguments would meet with some resistance from those who believe that equality means that we must deny differences between individuals. His arguments are also amenable to dissenting views as to what constitutes intelligence.

In particular, Arnold Kling and Claude M. Steele have written essays that attempt to address the questions around intelligence. There are many others who have attempted to address intelligence, usually in an attempt to explain or minimize the possibility of intelligence being constitutional and relatively immutable. For the purposes of my discussion, these distinctions do not matter.

I would suggest that in any society, technological progress depends on an extremely small percentage of extremely talented people (1/2%, perhaps?); they are supported by a larger, though still quite small, group of talented people who can apply and expand on the genius of the very few (another 2-5%?); in turn,there is a larger cohort, perhaps 15-25% of the population who have the requisite abilities to work the levers of the complex machinery that supports our incredibly complex society. How societies manage the inequalities that spring from such unequal abilities seems to me to be a key factor in sustaining a stable, highly dynamic, society.

[NB-My numbers are mere guesses but are reflective of the underlying dynamic of the intelligence bell curve.]